Ray Tracing on OMEN RTX GPUs: 2025 Benchmark Guide for New Zealand Gamers

The ray tracing revolution isn’t something to dream about anymore. It’s here, and it’s as beautiful as everyone anticipated. For gamers across New Zealand, from Auckland to Christchurch, the conversation has shifted from “does it have ray tracing” to “how well does it run with ray tracing”. This technology that replicates the natural behaviour of light has paved the way for hyper-realistic scenery, becoming the new benchmark for visual fidelity in gaming. But what does that mean for Kiwi gamers?

For gamers, it means reflections, shadows, and lighting that are indistinguishable from real life, creating a level of immersion once thought impossible. However, this stunning realism comes at the cost of serious hardware demands. That’s why our OMEN gaming desktops feature NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 40-series GPUs, to make these wonderful visuals accessible to gamers across different budgets. But is the hardware and performance cost worth the visual upgrade? And how does OMEN find the right balance between performance and aesthetics? This guide will answer all those questions. So without further ado, let’s dive in.

What is Ray Tracing? Understanding the Technology

Before we examine the statistics and tricks for optimising your system for ray tracing, let’s first understand the technology itself. For decades, video games have used a rendering technique called rasterisation. Think of it like creating a 2D painting of a 3D scene. It’s fast and effective, but it uses clever shortcuts and approximations to simulate lighting, shadows, and reflections.

Ray tracing, however, is more like a complete physics simulation. It traces the pathway of every individual ray of light from your viewpoint back to the light sources within your game, interacting with objects along the way, bouncing off a puddle or being blocked by a character. This allows the system to calculate the exact colour, brightness, and shadow information for every single pixel on your screen.

The Technical Advantage of Ray Tracing

Ray tracing fundamentally changes how games render light and shadow. Traditional rasterisation techniques use pre-baked lighting and screen-space reflections, which can look convincing but break down under scrutiny. Ray tracing calculates these effects in real-time, meaning reflections accurately show what’s actually in the scene, shadows respond naturally to multiple light sources, and global illumination creates realistic ambient lighting that bounces between surfaces.

This is particularly noticeable in games with complex environments or highly reflective surfaces. Puddles on city streets, polished marble floors, or the gleaming surface of a futuristic vehicle all benefit enormously from ray-traced reflections, creating a level of visual authenticity that simply wasn’t possible before.

OMEN RTX GPU Top Picks for Ray Tracing Performance

Our OMEN gaming laptops and desktops are designed to extract maximum performance from these powerful GPUs. With advanced thermal solutions like the OMEN Tempest Cooling system, we ensure your hardware runs at peak performance during the most intense ray-traced gaming sessions. Here are the most popular options available in New Zealand:

RTX 4060 Ti in OMEN systems: Your gateway to ray-traced gaming experiences. These GPUs are excellent for gamers hoping to enjoy 1080p ray tracing without sacrificing smooth frame rates.

RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti configurations: The sweet spot for high-refresh-rate 1440p gaming. OMEN desktops with an RTX 4070 provide a fantastic balance of price and performance, capable of handling demanding ray tracing in most modern triple-A titles.

RTX 4080 and 4090 flagship options: For extreme enthusiasts who demand an uncompromised 4K experience, these GPUs are the best option. These flagship cards deliver unmatched ray tracing performance at the highest resolutions.

Benchmark Methodology and Test Setup

But don’t just take our word for it. We ran benchmarks in some of the most demanding titles and have the results for you. To provide clear and objective results, we used a consistent test environment for all benchmarks.

Test System: OMEN 45L Gaming Desktop

Specifications:

• Processor: Intel® Core™ i9-13900K
• Memory: 32 GB DDR5 RAM
• Storage: 2 TB NVMe SSD

Games Tested: Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, Portal with RTX, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered

Settings Used: Tests were conducted at 1920 x 1080 (1080p), 2560 x 1440 (1440p), and 3840 x 2160 (4K) resolutions with the highest in-game graphical presets.

Performance Metrics: We tracked average frames per second (FPS) as our primary metric.

Why These Games Matter

The games selected for testing represent the cutting edge of ray tracing implementation. Cyberpunk 2077 with its Overdrive mode uses full path tracing, the most demanding form of ray tracing available. Alan Wake 2 implements comprehensive ray-traced lighting, shadows, and reflections. Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered showcases how ray tracing enhances reflections in an urban environment. Each title pushes the hardware differently, providing a comprehensive view of real-world performance.

Ray Tracing Performance Benchmarks

Here’s how our OMEN systems performed across a suite of the most demanding ray-traced games available today. “Native RT” refers to Ray Tracing enabled without DLSS, whilst “DLSS 3 Performance” refers to Ray Tracing enabled with DLSS 3 set to its Performance mode, including Frame Generation.

Cyberpunk 2077 (RT: Overdrive - Path Tracing)

DLSS 3 and Frame Generation Impact

As the benchmark results suggest, NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology is crucial for unlocking the full potential of games featuring ray tracing. But how exactly does it work?

DLSS is an AI-powered rendering technology that, in its traditional form (Super Resolution), renders the game at a lower internal resolution and then uses AI and the GPU’s Tensor Cores to intelligently upscale the image to your target resolution, reconstructing detail to look as good as native rendering.

With the RTX 40 Series, NVIDIA introduced Frame Generation, a revolutionary feature alongside DLSS 3, which analyses sequential frames and motion data to create new frames and inserts them between the traditionally rendered ones. This enhances the visual performance of the game whilst providing stable frame rates.

Understanding the Performance Multiplier

The difference between native ray tracing and DLSS 3 Performance mode is dramatic. In Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K, the RTX 4090 jumps from 28 FPS to 95 FPS—more than three times the performance. This isn’t just about making unplayable frame rates playable; it’s about transforming ray tracing from a visual novelty into a genuine gaming option. The AI-driven approach means you’re not simply lowering settings or resolution; you’re using machine learning to maintain visual quality whilst dramatically improving performance.

Is OMEN Ray Tracing Good? Performance Analysis

The benchmark results look impressive, but what do they mean in practice? From a performance perspective, OMEN desktops are exceptionally well-suited for running games with ray tracing. The primary challenge these systems face isn’t performance but heat, as ray tracing pushes your GPU to its absolute limit. This is why all of our desktops come with the OMEN Tempest Cooling Solution to manage heat effectively. This is a critical advantage of an integrated, professionally designed system.

Real-World Gaming Experience

Beyond the numbers, what does this mean for your actual gaming sessions? With an OMEN system featuring an RTX 4070 or higher, you can expect consistently smooth frame rates at 1440p with ray tracing enabled in virtually every modern game. The experience is transformative—reflections in Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered show the actual cityscape around you, not approximations. Lighting in Alan Wake 2 creates genuine atmosphere, with shadows that behave exactly as they would in reality. This level of immersion fundamentally changes how you experience games.

Optimising Ray Tracing on OMEN Systems

If you already own an OMEN PC, you can leverage certain capabilities already present within your machine to ensure the perfect balance between visual quality and performance. Here are tips to extract every last bit of power and performance from your computer.

Start with OMEN Gaming Hub: Use our built-in Gaming Hub software to ensure your system is running in Performance Mode, which optimises power and fan curves for gaming.

Let DLSS Do the Work: For most games, the best approach is to turn ray tracing settings to High or Ultra and then enable DLSS 3 in Quality or Balanced mode. This gives you the best visuals with minimal performance impact.

Know When to Disable: In highly competitive, fast-paced shooters where every millisecond counts, you may still want to prioritise raw frame rates over visual fidelity. Consider turning ray tracing off in these specific scenarios to push your FPS to its absolute maximum.

Game-Specific Settings: In some games, ray-traced reflections have a huge impact whilst ray-traced shadows are more subtle. You can often gain back significant performance by lowering or disabling one specific RT feature through the in-game settings without a major loss in overall quality.

Advanced Optimisation Techniques

Beyond the basics, there are several advanced techniques worth exploring. Many games allow you to customise individual ray tracing features separately. For example, you might enable ray-traced reflections and global illumination whilst leaving shadows at traditional rasterised settings. This hybrid approach can provide much of the visual improvement of full ray tracing whilst maintaining higher frame rates.

Additionally, monitor your GPU temperature and utilisation using the OMEN Gaming Hub. If you notice thermal throttling during extended gaming sessions, ensure your system has adequate ventilation. The OMEN Tempest Cooling system is designed to handle sustained loads, but proper airflow in your gaming space helps maintain peak performance.

Pairing Your OMEN System with the Right Display

Ray tracing’s visual benefits are only as good as the monitor displaying them. For the best experience, consider these factors when selecting a display:

Resolution Matching: Pair your GPU capability with an appropriate resolution. An RTX 4060 Ti shines at 1080p, the RTX 4070 excels at 1440p, whilst the RTX 4080 and 4090 are built for 4K gaming.

Refresh Rate: Higher refresh rates (144 Hz or above) ensure smooth gameplay. Even with ray tracing, modern OMEN systems can push high frame rates with DLSS enabled, making a high-refresh display worthwhile.

Panel Technology: IPS panels offer excellent colour reproduction and viewing angles, crucial for appreciating ray tracing’s realistic lighting and reflections. Consider OMEN gaming monitors designed specifically to complement your gaming system.

Future of Ray Tracing on OMEN

Like every other technological revolution, ray tracing will only improve with time. In 2025, we are at the cusp of even more widespread adoption of complete path tracing; however, the need for more powerful hardware will scale alongside technological advancement. Games launching in 2026 and beyond will be designed from the ground up with ray tracing in mind, making it less of a feature and more of a foundational element of game design. As NVIDIA continues to innovate with its next generation of GPUs and DLSS technology, you can be sure that future OMEN systems from HP will be ready to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

What’s Next for Ray Tracing Technology

The next generation of games will likely feature even more sophisticated implementations of ray tracing. We’re already seeing titles that use path tracing for all lighting calculations, eliminating traditional rasterisation entirely for light transport. This approach creates unprecedented realism but requires substantial GPU power. OMEN’s commitment to featuring the latest NVIDIA RTX technology ensures that New Zealand gamers will be ready for these advances as they arrive.

Machine learning will play an increasingly important role. DLSS has proven that AI can dramatically improve performance without sacrificing visual quality. Future iterations may offer even better image reconstruction, potentially allowing mid-range GPUs to deliver high-end visual experiences. The combination of advancing hardware and smarter software creates an exciting future for ray-traced gaming.

Conclusion: Choosing Your OMEN Ray Tracing System

After extensive testing across various titles, the verdict is clear: ray tracing is the future. The combination of dedicated ray tracing core hardware in OMEN PCs and the massive performance uplift provided by DLSS 3 means the performance of these machines has never been better. If you are still having trouble deciding which desktop to get, here is a quick breakdown:

For the 1080p Gamer: An OMEN with an RTX 4060 or RTX 4060 Ti is your perfect entry point into the world of ray tracing, offering a smooth and beautiful experience in the latest titles. These systems deliver excellent performance at Full HD resolution with ray tracing enabled.

For the 1440p Enthusiast: The RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti configurations hit the absolute sweet spot, delivering high-refresh-rate ray tracing that will satisfy both graphics enthusiasts and competitive players. 

For the 4K Purist: If you demand the absolute best with no compromises, an OMEN powerhouse with an RTX 4080 or RTX 4090 is the only choice for breathtaking 4K gaming with all ray tracing features enabled. 

Ray tracing has transformed from a futuristic dream into an accessible reality for New Zealand gamers. With OMEN’s range of systems featuring NVIDIA RTX 40-series GPUs, you can experience the stunning visual fidelity of ray-traced games without compromise. Whether you’re exploring photorealistic open worlds, engaging in atmospheric horror experiences, or simply appreciating the beauty of realistic lighting in your favourite titles, an OMEN system ensures you’re seeing games as their creators intended. The future of gaming is here, and it’s more beautiful than ever before.